"Send in the Clowns" - Peggy Lee ( more self-deluding doublethink)

Censure issue fading fast, but its cause is still grave concern
Wednesday, April 05, 2006

TOM TEEPEN

The Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on a proposal to censure President Bush for his literally unwarranted domestic spying flopped on opening day, like the really bad play that it was.

The Republican members of course were having none of it and the hearing was snubbed by the committee’s Democratic heavy hitters: Sens. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, Dianne Feinstein of California, Dick Durbin of Illinois, Charles Schumer of New York and Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware. (Schumer’s absence was especially telling. One of the most dangerous spots on Earth is the space between Schumer and the nearest TV camera.)

So the resolution will go nowhere. That was its sure fate from the moment Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., kited it and the reason so many of his colleagues found other chores for the day. Even so, censure is called for, if not formally, then broadly and emphatically.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act plainly requires warrants for such eavesdropping. The judges overseeing it are not stingy with warrants, and the law makes room for red-hot cases that need immediate action; warrants can be secured after the fact.

Bush instead insists the law doesn’t apply to him because as commander in chief he has wartime power to ignore any law he finds bothersome. An inconvenient statute against torturing prisoners? Poof, it is blown away, like a dandelion gone to seed.

Bush’s two attorneys general – first John Ashcroft and now Alberto Gonzales – have shilled for this astonishing assertion.

Although he came to office championing, he said, humility, Bush and those dancing court to him have come up with the scary concept of the "unitary executive" or "unitary presidency" – meaning, in effect, that he can do whatever he jolly well pleases.

From just moments after 9/11, Bush has said this war will take long years and we probably won’t even know exactly when it has ended. That sounds right.

Maybe one day, then, someone will say to somebody else: "You know, we haven’t had any terrorism for years. Maybe that war is over." And if one of the people in the conversation is president, the war will be over.

So Bush has claimed for himself and his successors a right to rule by fiat. The title for that sort of ruler is more nearly caesar than president.

Perhaps the most amazing part of this business is the apparent fact that the American people don’t give a rat’s tail. Anyone who might have had a twinge of concern at first was yelled down preemptively by right-wing and/or Republican spielers, not only, but not least, either, on talk radio. And a general attitude seems to have settled in that all politics is piffle, so what difference could any of it make?

This is civic debauchery. Citizenship is reduced to spectator sport, to be enjoyed or disdained according to the partisan predisposition of the onlookers and the fights in the audience are part of the show. The Internet has become a theater of attitudinal exhibitionism and social voyeurism.

So Bush gets away with claiming powers to imprison suspects indefinitely just on his say-so, to brush off Congress and its laws and to override generations-old treaties – all under the empowering colors of his unitary presidency.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the circus. Enjoy yourselves.

Tom Teepen writes for Cox News Service.
teepencolumn@coxnews.com